Let TV be TV!

Celebrating shows that understand what medium they're in, plus George Wendt, 'The Last of Us,' 'Sirens,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I borrow eight grand from a guy named Shady "The Kneecapper" McGee…

Right back where we started from

Over the last couple of years, I’ve made mention in various Rolling Stone columns or newsletter items to the relief I feel lately whenever a new TV show acts as if it not only understands that it’s a TV show, but like it wants to be a TV show. There’s still a place for intensely serialized prestige drama when it’s great, like Andor usually was. But on the whole, it’s been exasperating to see the medium I love overrun by creators who clearly don’t love or understand it, and whose series would be a whole lot better if they would stop trying to be 10-Hour Movies. So thank god for the Poker Faces, The Pitts of this world.

I finally put a lot of those stray thoughts into a single column, celebrating those shows and others like them. Because this was written for the latest issue of the print magazine, I didn’t have room to mention every series in this vein, so just insert references to, say, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds wherever makes sense to you.

Sister act

Because I usually only get one shot at writing about a binge-release series, it can be hard to choose between writing a traditional, spoiler-free review, or doing something that assumes the reader has seen the thing and wants me to dig into it more. Usually, I err on the side of the former, but every now and then there’s a show where all of the things I really want to talk about require serious spoilage. Case in point: Sirens, the new Netflix miniseries starring Meghann Fahy and Milly Alcock as estranged sisters who get mixed up with an eccentric rich couple played by Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon. Created by Molly Smith Metzler, this one’s a big tonal mess with lots of mismatched pieces, and periodic moments that left me baffled — the ending in particular. So I wrote about that. I really liked Smith Metzler’s last Netflix show, Maid, and between the four leads and a supporting cast that includes Bill Camp, Josh Segarra, and Glenn Howerton, I was excited to watch this. Oh, well.

Norm! (RIP)

George Wendt died on Tuesday at the age of 77. Cheers is my favorite live-action sitcom of all time, and Norm is the Cheers character who made me laugh more consistently than any other, especially when I was watching the series as a kid. So I wrote a tribute to the greatest one-liner deliveryman in television history.

Thanks for everything, big guy.

Reunited, and it feels so good

As I discussed in my recap, this week’s episode of The Last of Us was the best episode of Season Two by a wide margin, and in a way that made me more frustrated with the rest of it. I’ve enjoyed a number of things in the Seattle story, particularly the work that Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced are doing together. But the second Ramsey is sharing the screen with Pedro Pascal again, the show goes to such a deeper and more interesting level that I again find myself asking why any creator would look at their work together and decide to kill off Joel. In fact, I literally asked this question to the creator of the game, and co-creator of the show, Neil Druckmann. While he acknowledged that there were discussions about delaying the Abby story, and even letting Joel live, he seemed dismissive of both ideas, because he wants to tell the story from the game, and he wants to satisfy the gamers, whom he feels have been waiting years to see it play out in live action. (Oh, and he had lots of kind things to say about Tony Dalton and Joseph Pants.)

Feel free to talk more about the season’s penultimate chapter here, or in this week’s chat.

Odds and/or ends

• Big Mouth returned this week for its eighth and final season. I’ve long been a fan of Nick Kroll and company’s raunchy animated comedy about the horror and absurdity of puberty, and wrote a tribute to it at the end of the penultimate season. I haven’t seen the entire season yet, but what I’ve watched feels very much of a piece with what’s come before, even though the kids are in high school now and (minor spoiler!) Nick even finally has a bit of a growth spurt. Also, there’s a segment in the annual anthology episode (the ninth) that felt extremely micro-targeted to me and my interests. (No spoilers whatsoever on that; you’ll know it when you get there.)

• Back in December, I wrote a plea for someone, anyone, in the TV business to save Sesame Street from being Zaslaved. Well, that someone has materialized in the form of Netflix, which will not only make new episodes, but allow those episodes to debut on PBS on the same day each one hits the streamer.

• The Studio finale dropped this week. When this show was very good — heartbroken Scorsese, exasperated Sarah Polley, the entirety of the Kool-Aid casting episode — it was fantastic. When it wasn’t — Sal vs Quinn — it could feel frantic and airless. The Cinemacon two-parter that ended this season was a bit of both. But good lord were both Zoë Kravitz and, especially, Bryan Cranston spectacularly good at playing extremely high versions of their characters. Walter White has so thoroughly overshadowed the rest of Cranston’s career that it’s easy to forget what an incredibly game, versatile, and physically gifted comedian he was, and still is. Apple has ordered another season, and I’m looking forward to it.

• While some changes my be in store for the newsletter later this year, a disadvantage of the current community format is that I’m often dropping reviews to shows that people haven’t seen by the time the newsletter comes out, so there’s no discussion of them. So I thought I might remind you that last week I reviewed a trio of new shows: Murderbot, Duster, and Overcompensating. If you watched any or all of them, I’m curious for your takes.

Poker Face recaplet: ‘Hometown Hero’

Because of the constance shift in settings, guest stars, and even tones, Poker Face can feel wildly different from one week to the next, and the quality can vary. For the most part, “Hometown Hero” slots in at mid-tier for the series. The most memorable and amusing thing in it is Charlie’s accidental drug trip, featuring B.J. Novak as the inventor of the canned cheese substitute that gives the minor league ballpark its name. And even that sticks out a bit less than it should because Charlie had a cosmic experience just last week with Gator Joe’s gator. (RIP, Gator Joe.)

The Yankees have a minor league affiliate in New Jersey that I try to visit a few times a summer. It’s a strange world that seems like great fodder for a show like this, mixing in has-beens like Simon Rex’s character, potential future stars like our latest murder victim, and weird little promotions and rituals. And the story of Dock Ellis pitching a no-hitter while high on LSD is one of the great pieces of baseball lore. (It’s also the subject of a fun documentary, No No: A Dockumentary, which is on Pluto right now.)

But this is one of those episodes that feels like it needs more of Charlie interacting with the killer, and/or one more twist to the story. Nothing bad, but it didn’t quite click. That said, I appreciate that, now that Charlie can actually call in the cops for help because she’s not a fugitive, the show is being clever about how she calls them in. Having a cop pose as a major league scout to bait Russ into throwing his fastball is a smart piece of business, and true to the Columbo tradition of the killer’s ego ultimately dooming them.

No spoilers, but next week’s is maybe my favorite of what I’ve seen so far from this season.

That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?